A couple months ago I spoke with a friend who is a city planner for a top firm and earned his master's from [one of] the top planning schools in the country. He knows some people involved with this project, and apparently those in charge decided to just wing it rather than hire a professional planning firm. Imagine all of the data you must consider when trying to develop a decent-sized city not only for today, but for 30 years into the future. It's a tremendous undertaking and to just skip out on planning sounded to me like it was a significant contributing factor to the demise of this urban renewal.
creating a tech hub that could drive the economy, much in the same way startups are now thriving in places such as Pittsburgh
This isn't even remotely true. Pittsburgh has very little in terms of successful startups. Do you want to program in Java and C++ in a cubicle? That's the nature of Pittsburgh's "tech hub." Pittsburgh's economy is driven by education, medicine, banking, steel/glass/aluminum/natgas.
Pittsburgh, for instance, has Carnegie Mellon, which has focused on turning campus ideas into new businesses
This is why I have to seriously question articles and stories about fields in which I'm not informed. This is absolutely not true. CMU is a joke with regard to startups. DuoLingo, Yinzcam, and Shoefitr are perhaps the only notable ones. There are some robotics startups no one has heard of, but a Stanford English major has a better likelihood of even creating a tech startup than a CMU CS grad.
creating a tech hub that could drive the economy, much in the same way startups are now thriving in places such as Pittsburgh
This isn't even remotely true. Pittsburgh has very little in terms of successful startups. Do you want to program in Java and C++ in a cubicle? That's the nature of Pittsburgh's "tech hub." Pittsburgh's economy is driven by education, medicine, banking, steel/glass/aluminum/natgas.
Pittsburgh, for instance, has Carnegie Mellon, which has focused on turning campus ideas into new businesses
This is why I have to seriously question articles and stories about fields in which I'm not informed. This is absolutely not true. CMU is a joke with regard to startups. DuoLingo, Yinzcam, and Shoefitr are perhaps the only notable ones. There are some robotics startups no one has heard of, but a Stanford English major has a better likelihood of even creating a tech startup than a CMU CS grad.